Victoria`s Secret beats the spam filters--one ISP at a time

Once bogged down by e-mail spam filters that were blocking too much of its marketing, Victoria`s Secret has fashioned a more effective e-mail program that skirts the filters and connects with customers, the company says.

Once bogged down by e-mail spam filters that were blocking too much of its marketing, apparel retailer Victoria`s Secret has fashioned a more effective e-mail program that skirts the filters and connects with customers, Ken Weil, vice president of new media and the head of VictoriasSecret.com, tells Internet Retailer.

“When spam became a problem and e-mail delivery portals began to address the issue, at first they did things crudely, and just said that anyone sending a lot of e-mail is bad,” Weil says. “In our case, they didn’t understand that the mail was from us to our customers.”

Victoria’s Secret had created a list of 6 million e-mail addresses of customers who had signed up to receive information from Victoria’s Secret. Armed with records of customers who had opted in to receive its e-mail, Victoria`s Secret took its case directly to ISPs. “We helped them to understand that were not part of the spam issue,” Weil says.

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Overcoming the spam filters, which often didn’t apply nuanced analysis to the e-mail they were blocking, took a lot of work. “We had to go one on one, working closely with AOL and others,” Weil says.

Using a hosted e-mail service from Digital Impact, Victoria’s Secret, which maintains a list of 6 million e-mail addresses, is able to deliver huge amounts of e-mail customized to different groups of customers by shopping behavior, Weil says. “So it’s segmented to the right people at the right time,” he says.

“E-mail marketing is more effective for us now than it was a year ago," he says. "As we get smarter about how to approach our customers with e-mail, they respond better. We’ve learned how customers responded to swimwear or sleepwear in the past, and then by segmenting our e-mail list based on purchasing behavior, we get a better response rate."